With famous members like Robert Capa, Hen-ri Cartier-Bresson and Erwitt Elliott, Magnum is a unique kind of organisation. Its impact can be seen through the visuals its members put out over the years, shaping our views on the world along the way. But this impact also becomes clear through the incredible stories shared by the photographers themselves.

The Magnum Manifesto includes photogra-phers from every generation of Magnum’s illustrious history. It’s divided into three sec-tions, each discussing a different era through the eyes of Magnum’s members. We spoke to three of those represented – Constantine Manos, Richard Kalvar and Olivia Arthur.

CONSTANTINE MANOS (BORN 1934)

“I’m sure Magnum has the greatest photo-graphic archive in the world. Not the biggest, but the richest and the most interesting,” says Constantine Manos, who joined the agency in 1964. At 83, Constantine is now one of the oldest Magnum members.

He was first introduced to photography when he was only 15 years old. He discovered his school’s darkroom and started shooting for the school’s newspaper.

“1952 was an important year, because then I first read about this photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson,” Constantine says.

Magnum Photos is one of the oldest and most prestigious photography

agencies in the world. This year marks its 70th anniversary, and to mark

this milestone, there is a new book and exhibition celebrating the images

and the image-makers who have contributed to its success. Both Thames &

Hudson’s book and the Magnum Manifesto show at the International Center of

Photography in New York provide an insight into the way the agency and its

photographers evolved over the past decades.

words by Suzanne Tromp

WeTransfer presents:

WeTransfer presents: Magnum Manifesto – 01/05

HERBERT LIST.

EYES IN THE SKY.

PARIS, FRANCE.

ROBERT CAPA.

FRENCH ELECTIONS,

VOTER LEAVES

CURTAINED VOTING

BOOTHS.

PARIS, FRANCE.

W. EUGENE SMITH.

DR. CERIANI WITH LEE

MARIE WHEATLY, A TWO

AND A HALF YEAR OLD

CHILD WHO NEEDED

EMERGENCY TREATMENT

AFTER HAVING BEEN

KICKED IN THE HEAD

BY A HORSE.

COLORADO, USA.

WERNER BISCHOF.

INTERNATIONAL PRESS

PHOTOGRAPHERS COVERING

THE KOREAN WAR.

KAESONG, SOUTH KOREA.

WeTransfer presents: Magnum Manifesto – 02/05

LEONARD FREED.

MARTIN LUTHER KING.

BALTIMORE,

MARYLAND, USA

DENNIS STOCK.

ON THE SET OF THE

PLANET OF THE APES.

CALIFORNIA, USA.

ON THIS PAGE:

CONSTANTINE MANOS.

DAUFUSKIE ISLAND.

SOUTH CAROLINA, USA (1952).

“I’d taken pictures before, but I didn’t know anything about good

photography. Reading about Cartier-Bresson changed my life.”

“I read his philosophy and I saw some of his pictures in a magazine. He doesn’t allow crop-ping and I learned about his concept of the decisive moment. I thought, wow, this is for me. This is what I want to do.”

Constantine got himself a Leica and some Ilford film (as used by his new hero Henri), and set out for an island off the coast of South Carolina, called Daufuskie. It had been a plan-tation, and was still inhabited by descendants of slaves.

“I did a little essay about a ten-year-old boy, who lived with an old couple – he was an orphan.” This would turn into Constantine’s first series of pictures, now showcased in the Magnum Manifesto.

“I’d taken pictures before, but I didn’t know anything about good photography. Reading about Cartier-Bresson changed my life.”

And so when Constantine was 18, he took the Greyhound bus from Colombia to New York to visit the Magnum office and show his pictures.

“I met Cornell Capa there, and Cornell said, ‘Come let’s have a drink.’ I had never been in a bar before in my life, I had never had a drink. So I said, ‘I’ll have whatever you’re having,’ and he was having scotch. So that was my first drink, and I’ve been drinking scotch ever since.”

After this encounter Constantine did some smaller jobs for Magnum, but the project that got him invited to join the agency was his Greek Portfolio. His parents, who had emigrat-ed from Greece to the US, always referenced a village they came from. So Constantine decided to visit their home country and shoot daily life there.

“I realised the best villages were the ones that had no electricity. They were very prim-itive and beautiful and simple. It was the old Greece. It was like nothing had changed in 200 years,” Constantine says.

He left a box of prints with the Magnum when traveling through Paris. Back in Athens, he was pleasantly surprised by a letter from the

RENE BURRI.

ERNESTO GUEVARE

(CHE), ARGENTINIAN

POLITICIAN, MINISTER

OF INDUSTRY (1961-1965)

DURING AN EXCLUSIVE

INTERVIEW IN HIS

OFFICE.

HAVANA, CUBA.

MARC RIBOUD.

PHOTOGRAPHER’S RALLY.

KARUIZAWA, JAPAN.

MARC RIBOUD.

A YOUNG AMERICAN GIRL, JAN ROSE

KASMIR, CONFRONTS THE AMERICAN

NATIONAL GUARD OUTSIDE THE

PENTAGON DURING THE 1967 ANTI-

VIETNAM MARCH.

WASHINGTON DC, USA.

LEONARD FREED

A MAN TAKEN INTO

CUSTODY IN A POLICE

CAR.

NEW YORK CITY, USA.

MARILYN SILVERSTONE.

VILLAGERS LOOKING AT SLIDES

OF THEMSELVES.

YUMTHANG, NORTH SIKKIM, INDIA

ON THIS PAGE:

RICHARD KALVAR.

OKLAHOMA SENATOR FRED HARRIS

CAMPAIGNING FOR THE DEMOCRATIC

PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION, SHAKING

HANDS WITH PEOPLE ENTERING THE

SUBWAY.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, USA (1976).

famous agency. “It said, ‘Dear Constantine, we have just had our annual meeting and you are invited to become an associate member.’ Of course I was thrilled to death.”

Constantine is a traditional photographer in the sense that he truly believes in the voice of the person taking the picture. He says though, with the overabundance of cameras nowa-days, everyone thinks they are a photographer.

“They are photographers, of course, but it is very difficult to be an exceptional one. There are a lot of people looking for a gimmick, making a picture different for its own sake.” He finds this problematic because, “you’re tampering with the truth. And you’re tamper-ing with believability, which is one of the great qualities of photography.

“I think the best pictures are like poems, they’re things in your head, in your memory bank, in your brain.

“I think the decisive moment is very important in a picture; a successful photograph is a surprise. They should exist for their own sake. They should be something that give people pleasure and enriches their lives.”

RICHARD KALVAR (BORN 1944)

Richard Kalvar can be best described as a street photographer. Whether he’s shooting in Rome, Paris or New York, his photos show a mix of ordinary life and ambiguous story-telling – at first glance they seem to depict a normal scene, but at closer inspection there’s an extra layer hidden in the pictures.

He became a Magnum member in 1977, after a slight misunderstanding in which he thought he was in, only to find there was a final hurdle to clear. No matter, he was approved and even went on to serve as the agency’s president for a time.

His work in the Magnum Manifesto is a series of pictures taken in a Boston subway station during Fred Harris’ unsuccessful 1976 elec-toral campaign. “People would come by and shake his hand, and then another person and another person. There was a certain ridiculousness to the situation which became interesting.”

“I think the decisive moment is very important in a picture; a successful

photograph is a surprise. They should exist for their own sake.”

PAUL FUSCO.

ROBERT KENNEDY

FUNERAL TRAIN.

PHILADELPHIA, USA.

WeTransfer presents: Magnum Manifesto – 03/05

STEVE MCCURRY.

MAN IN WHEELCHAIR

READS TO BOY.

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN.

BRUNO BARBEY

GULF WAR. BURGAN OIL FIELDS. U.S. MARINES

POSE FOR A PHOTO IN FRONT OF A BURNED

VEHICLE CONTAINING A CHARRED CORPSE.

KUWAIT .

MARTIN PARR

JURMALA.

LATVIA.

The result is a series of repetitive photos of the candidate in the same position, shaking people’s hands. “Each photograph in itself is not great, but when you put them in sequence it creates this absurdist vibe,” Richard ex-plains.

Yet, Richard is actually drawn to try and con-vey a story within a single image. “In general I don't tell stories with a series of pictures, where each picture tells a different aspect,” he says.

“What interests me is when each picture tells a story; you can take it out of its context and it has a life of its own that goes beyond the obvious descriptive type of photography.”

OLIVIA ARTHUR (BORN 1980)

Olivia Arthur is one of the younger genera-tion photographers who’s represented in the Magnum Manifesto. She was first introduced to the agency in 2002 when she won the Inge Morath Award, established as a tribute to the pioneering female photographer.

“It’s quite famously a very male agency,” says Olivia. “There’s definitely an awareness about this within the whole community of Magnum. There are a lot of young female photogra-phers out there, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be taking them on.”

Olivia had just started her career when she became a member in 2008. “Some people come to the agency when they’re more estab-lished but a lot of people join when they are quite young and that’s encouraged,” she says. “You grow with the agency. It’s the idea of the big family.”

That’s why street photography appeals to him. On the streets an encounter with someone is short, so you don’t have the time to grasp who a person exactly is and what they do. “I can let myself go a little bit, because I'm not say-ing what these people are like,” Richard says. “I’m showing my first impression, so I don't really feel a big responsibility.”

This means he doesn’t shy away from adding multiple interpretations to events through his imagery. “I like to be very ambiguous so you don't know what's going on. It looks like something is happening and it's not necessari-ly happening,” he says.

“It's kind of playing with this idea of what reality is. I'm working on the edge of reality.”

OLIVIA ARTHUR.

WORKERS TAKE A BREAK

FROM A CONSTRUCTION SITE

IN DUBAI BUSINESS BAY.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB

EMIRATES (2014).

OLIVIA ARTHUR.

STEPS INTO THE WATER

ON THE DUBAI CREEK.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB

EMIRATES (2013).

OLIVIA ARTHUR.

THE REMNANTS OF THE MV

DARA WRECK WHICH LIES IN

20M OF WATER OFF THE COAST

OF DUBAI, AND HAS BECOME

COVERED IN FISHING NETS.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB

EMIRATES (2013).

“It's kind of playing with this idea of what reality is. I'm working on

the edge of reality.”

WeTransfer presents: Magnum Manifesto – 04/05

Olivia acknowledges some of her peers might find her work experimental, but she feels the core of her work is actually quite traditional. “It starts out with a concept – which is a made up concept of a fictional character – but that’s just a vehicle. It’s essentially a docu-mentary project about Dubai.”

The photos are compiled in a book with transparent paper, allowing readers to see multiple images at once. Next to that she mixes old maps and text snippets from inter-views with locals in with her photos, cleverly combining the past with the present.

“I’m not at all afraid of mixing texts with pho-tography. If they’re used in the right way, they can enhance each other in a wonderful way,” she says.

“Some people can bring a whole story in one image, but for me it is about these series of narratives. It’s about putting things together; the ability to tell something more, to tell a story.”

70 YEARS OF MAGNUM

Across the work of Constantine, Richard and Olivia we see and hear different ideas about the role of both a photograph and a photogra-pher.

But whatever position the Magnum members take, there is it seems a common thread that unites them. “I think we all make work that looks at things going on in the world, whether they’re large events or tiny, micro, one-family one-person stories,” Olivia says.

Constantine agrees. “One of the greatest, most important subjects Magnum has cap-tured from the beginning is humanity. It is people. Ordinary people.”

Olivia says she became more confident playing around with her photography after becoming part of the Magnum community. Stranger, her first series at the agency and the one included in the manifesto, pushes the idea of the medium’s role from merely documenting a moment, towards it becoming more of a narrative art form.

Stranger depicts the past and the present of Dubai. “People never speak about the history of Dubai, they always talk about the future – what it will be. No one ever looked at how this place became what it is.”

While researching Dubai’s history, she came across a story about a shipwreck in 1961, off the city’s coast. “There’s this family who lost their son in the shipwreck but believed he was

MARTIN PARR.

ST. PETER'S SQUARE.

FROM TUTTA ROMA.

ROME, ITALY.

still alive. To this day they still search for him; they place ads every now and then to try and find him.”

Struck by this tale, she came up with a fic-tional character of a young passenger who survived the disaster. “This is when it became conceptional: imagine if someone ended up on an island somewhere in the Gulf, and they come to the city now – how would they see it?”

And so the project shows the city as if seen through the eyes of this stranger, reflecting the feeling of alienation Olivia felt when first wandering the streets of Dubai. “Nobody feels like they properly belong. There’s this feeling of isolation and chaos.”

WeTransfer presents: Magnum Manifesto – 05/05

OLIVIA ARTHUR.

A COUPLE PHOTOGRAPH

THEMSELVES ON THEIR MOBILE

PHONE IN FRONT OF THE

CASPIAN SEA.

RAMSAR, IRAN.

ALEX MAJOLI.

MASS GRAVES OF REBEL

SOLDIERS KILLED BY

QADDAFI. IT IS BELIEVED

BY HUMAN RIGHTS

GROUPS THAT MANY MORE

BODIES HAVE YET TO BE

DISCOVERED.

JANZOUR, LIBYA.

A. ABBAS.

FAMILIES SEARCHING FOR THEIR LOVED

ONES, WHO HAVE DISAPPEARED DURING

THE US BOMBING, EXHIBIT THEIR PHOTOS

OVER MAKESHIFT GRAVES DUG IN THE

GARDEN OF A HOSPITAL.

BAGHDAD, IRAQ.